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Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel Prize for literature for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” pic.twitter.com/zw2LBQSJ4j
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021
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The Tanzanian novelist, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, has published ten novels as well as a number of short stories.
The Nobel committee said that “the theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work”.
For this year, winners were hard to predict. Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, French writer Annie Ernaux, Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Canada’s Margaret Atwood, and Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid were marked as this year’s favourites by the British bookmakers.
Last year’s prize went to American poet Louise Glck for what the judges described as her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. Glck was a popular choice after several years of controversy.
In 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners.
The awarding of the 2019 prize to Austrian writer Peter Handke caused protests because of his strong support for the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over USD 1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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